I am more and more certain that Trump and his racist gangs of violent thugs will attempt a coup when the polling results come in after November 3.

A racist coup d’etat (or armed overthrow of the government) has, in fact, happened before here in the US: Wilmington NC, in 1898. Look it up. There was also an unsuccessful attempt by bankers to overthrow FDR in 1934.

Here are some ideas from one group on how to stop a coup.

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10 Things You Need to Know to Stop a Coup

1. Don’t expect results Election night.

Election season 2020 is shaping up to be very unusual. Many mail-in ballots may not be counted until days or weeks after Election Day. Since Democrats are expected to use them more frequently than Republicans, voter tallies are expected to swing towards Democrats post-election night (they call it a“blue shift”)…

James Hohmann of the Washington Post gathered interesting post-debate happenings.

Joe Biden left Cleveland on a chartered Amtrak train and made a six-city whistlestop trip through areas of Ohio and a Pennsylvania that Trump won in 2016.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to face negative responses and from Republican leaders, silence, due to his inability to denounce white supremacists, and his dog whistle that inspired the violent rightwing “Proud Boys,” which the Anti-Defamation League calls a hate group.

Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes make it one of the most critical battlegrounds, and Biden predicted that over the next month he will be able to win over more Trump 2016 voters in rural counties like the ones he visited on Wednesday. “Even if we just cut the margin, it makes a gigantic difference,” Biden said at the airport named for Murtha. “A lot of White working-class Democrats thought we forgot them and didn’t pay…

I wanted to share an absolutely brilliant series of suggestions on how to deal with Trump’s nomination of Judge Barrett. The best parts are towards the end, so read all the way through!

This is by Bill Svelmoe.

I never heard of him before, but this is great. Drag it out until almost the election, and use the hearings to get Barrett on record as either approving or condemning Trumps’s many documented instances of repeated, actual, non-hypothetical but illegal conduct.

Here are Svelmoe’s words:

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A few thoughts on Amy Coney Barrett, our new Supreme Court justice.

• As noted above, she’s a done deal. So Democrats should not waste time trying to besmirch her character, focusing on her religion, trying to box her into a corner on how she will vote on hypothetical cases.

The People of Praise is not a cult. I’ve had half a dozen of their kids…

Dana Milbank is a regular columnist for the Washington Post.

He writes:

America, this is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning.

For five years, my colleagues and I have taken pains to avoid Nazi comparisons. It is usually hyperbolic, and counterproductive, to label the right “fascists” in the way those on the right reflexively label the left “socialists.” But this is no longer a matter of name-calling.

With his repeated refusals this week to accept the peaceful transfer of power — the bedrock principle that has sustained American democracy for 228 years — President Trump has put the United States, in some ways, where Germany was in 1933, when Adolf Hitler used the suspicious burning of the German parliament to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state.

Overwrought, you say? Then ask Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a top authority on Nazism and Stalinism. “The Reichstag has been on a…

What if?

What if Trump loses the election but refuses to accept the results?

What if he continues to say, as he will, that the election was rigged? He has actually said that the only valid election is one that he wins. He has prepared the public to believe that the election is a fraud.

Here are some suggestions from a group that’s thought about this dilemma. I don’t know the individuals involved but I think many people should be thinking hard about a potential and likely crisis of our system. Trump rules by creating chaos, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that he would cling to power by any means necessary. I picture him clinging to the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, his tiny hands grasping it to his large belly.

Read the report here.

I just finished reading Michael Cohen’s new tell-all about his years as Donald Trump’s “fixer.” It is called Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump. Quite a lot of the book consists of Cohen flaying himself for being a lackey who happily did Trump’s bidding, even when he knew that he was being asked to lie, cheat, or cover up for Trump’s misdeeds. He was a lawyer, and he showed no respect for the law. His job for Trump was to twist the law to benefit Trump and to silence those who claimed that Trump had wronged them.

There is a morbid fascination to the book. It confirms everything that Trump’s most rabid critics have said about him. He lies whenever it suits his purposes, and he expects his top executives to lie for him without hesitation. He is unscrupulous, amoral, cynical, and completely…

The Washington Post published an explosive story based on audios supplied by Donald Trump’s sister, Maryanne, a retired federal judge.

Maryanne Trump Barry was serving as a federal judge when she heard her brother, President Trump, suggest on Fox News, “maybe I’ll have to put her at the border” amid a wave of refugees entering the United States. At the time, children were being separated from their parents and put in cramped quarters while court hearings dragged on.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”

Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said…

Bill McKibben writes frequently about the environment, climate change, and rural life for the New Yorker.. Here he writes that Trump’s attack on the Postal Service Threatens democracy. The irony, McKibben points out, is that rural voters who heavily support Trump will lose the most by his actions.

I’ve lived most of my life in small towns in pretty remote rural areas. Some were in red regions, some were purplish-blue—but every last one of them centered on the local post office. I remember years of picking up the mail from a little window in the postmaster’s living room. (If you called her the postmistress, she would tartly reply, “Uncle Sam can’t afford mistresses.”) Eventually, she needed her parlor back, to have room to work on her genealogy projects, so the community built a small freestanding building. Where I live now, the local post office takes up a third of the…

Barack Obama was president of the United States for eight years without a single scandal. None of his aides were arrested and jailed. I disagreed with his education policies but I respect him as a man of integrity and a patriot.

This is the speech he delivered to the virtual Democratic National Convention.

Please watch. It was riveting.